Gov. Brian Kemp won’t soon have to face a decision on whether to remove members of Georgia’s State Election Board who are under fire for approving new rules that critics say are designed to favor former President Donald Trump.
That’s because state Attorney General Chris Carr, a Kemp ally, declined to issue an advisory opinion Friday on whether state law gives Kemp the power to address ethics complaints against the pro-Trump trio that controls the five-member board.
Instead, Carr’s four-page opinion said the Democratic officials and voting rights activists demanding that Kemp remove the members don’t have the legal authority to trigger a hearing. State law, Carr wrote, “should not be interpreted to mean that a citizen can simply submit information to the Governor and trigger the hearing process.”
The opinion from Carr is welcome news to the governor. Kemp has tried to avoid getting into fights over election laws after drawing Trump’s fury for opposing the former president’s attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat in Georgia.
With their long-running feud only recently put on hiatus, Kemp has described any attempts to relitigate Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia’s presidential contest as a “distraction” from GOP efforts to recapture a state that Trump’s campaign considers vital to his November hopes.
The governor is trying to balance his allegiance to his party while preparing for what could be a fresh onslaught of Trumpian attacks on a voting system he has long defended.
On one flank, Democrats assail Kemp for refusing to block election rules changes they say could set the stage for a new MAGA attempt to reverse the results should the Democrat candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, prevail in Georgia.
They warn that new rules muscled through by the board’s majority that allow county election boards to make undefined “reasonable inquiries” before certifying results could be exploited by pro-Trump local officials to undermine the outcome.
Far-right Republicans, meanwhile, have accused Kemp of failing to support the pro-Trump majority’s attempts to revive inquiries into Fulton County’s 2020 vote count or allow for open-ended investigations of the upcoming election.
What happens next is unclear, but Democratic legislators and others who filed the complaints have long maintained that Kemp has clear authority under Georgia law to remove board members for ethical violations.
They note in complaints that Trump has lionized the three board members, calling them “pit bulls” for voter integrity at an Atlanta rally in August. And they cite that one member, Rick Jeffares, proposed himself as a candidate for a post as regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency if Trump wins.
Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, the political organization that Kemp rival Stacey Abrams founded, said the opinion “leaves a gaping hole where accountability should lie.”
“How can it be that we, the people of Georgia, are powerless against an unelected pro-Trump administrative body that cannot be removed by the governor in the face of clear misconduct?” he said.
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